Abraham Abulafia

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Abraham Abulafia (1240–c.1291) was a Spanish Jewish mystic who founded what he called prophetic Kabbalah — a discipline that treated the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and above all the names of God, as instruments for loosening the mind from ordinary thought and carrying it toward union with the divine. Where the Kabbalah of his contemporaries, the circle that produced the Zohar, mapped the inner life of God through the ten sefirot, Abulafia turned the work inward and upward: not a diagram of the godhead but a technique for reaching it.

Born in Saragossa and raised in Tudela, he left the Iberian peninsula as a young man on a journey to find the legendary river Sambatyon and the lost tribes of Israel — a journey he abandoned in the Levant. He returned to study the philosophy of Maimonides, whose rationalism he revered and then pushed past, reading the Guide of the Perplexed as a coded ascent toward prophecy rather than its denial. From the 1270s he taught and wrote prolifically across Italy, Greece, and Sicily, producing manuals of practice and a series of works he described as prophetic, including Sefer ha-Ot and Or ha-Sekhel. In 1280 he traveled to Rome intending to confront Pope Nicholas III; according to his own account he was condemned to burn and saved only by the pope’s sudden death.

The method at the center of his teaching was tzeruf — the combination and permutation of letters. The practitioner would write, chant, and turn over the letters of the divine names in fixed sequences, coordinating them with patterns of breathing and movement of the head, until the discursive mind fell silent and what Abulafia called the “knots” binding the soul came undone. The end he described was a flooding of the intellect by a higher Intellect, sometimes figured as the meeting of two who become one. He held that this state was genuine prophecy, available in principle to the trained mind, and he understood himself to have reached it; toward the end of his life he made open messianic claims that drew the censure of leading rabbis, including Solomon ben Adret, who worked to discredit him.

Modern scholarship, above all the work of Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel, has recovered Abulafia as the major representative of an “ecstatic” or “prophetic” strand of Kabbalah standing apart from the dominant theosophical one, and has traced both its debts to earlier letter-mysticism and the structural likeness of its techniques to contemplative methods elsewhere — the disciplined recitation of divine names among the Sufis, certain Indian uses of mantra. The resemblances are real and have been noted carefully; they are not evidence of borrowing, and each system means its own thing by the practice. His writings later reached Christian readers: Pico della Mirandola and other Renaissance students of Kabbalah drew on this current. Much of his work survived only in manuscript, copied quietly by those who valued it, for centuries after his death.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · Westcott — Sepher Yetzirah (1911)

→ Related: Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Rumi · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Logos